Lars Laumann, Season of Migration To The North, 2015
Selected by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway
Lars Laumann was born 1975 and is one of Norway’s most internationally acclaimed artists. By filming, editing, and juxtaposing a mix of appropriated materials and subjectively experienced narratives, Laumann creates virtuoso, visual film collages that feature an extensive cast of characters. Laumann has an attraction to popular culture and explores the tales from people living outside the norm, in the margins of the margin. The film is a refugee story, told from the perspective of a young, gay Sudanese asylum-seeker, doubly ostracized through homophobia and Islamophobia. In the video piece, Laumann challenges the view of Scandinavia as a utopian free country, highlighting how difficult it is to escape discrimination and persecution.
Nguyen Hai Yen, Summer siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn, 2017
Selected by DOCLAB, Hanoi
In the midsummer of a tropical country, persons are taking their siesta, personas dream of time, nothing but the tranquility of time. A young woman is absorbed by a Vietnamese film on TV while female figures in a forest with mirrored cut outs over their faces reflect back what they see. Nguyen Hai Yen was born 1976 in Vietnam. Nguyen Hai Yen plays with language, water, mirror and emptiness and sees herself as Borges’ ”Funes, el memorioso” (Funes the Memorious) after being thrown by a half-tamed horse and becoming physically paralyzed decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories.
